There are two things that connect the names Gauss, Riemann, Hilbert
and Noether. One is their outstanding breadth of contributions to the
field of mathematics. The other is that each was a professor at the same
university in Göttingen, Germany.Although relatively unknown today, Göttingen, a small German university town, was for a time one of the most productive centers of mathematics in history.Göttingen’s rise to mathematical primacy occurred over generations,
but its fall took less than a decade when its stars were pushed abroad
by the advent of National Socialism, the ideology of the Nazi Party. The
university’s best minds left Germany in the early 1930s,
transferring its substantial mathematical legacy to Princeton, New York
University, and other British and American universities. By 1943, 16 former Göttingen faculty members were in the US.The
story of the rise and fall of mathematics in Göttingen has largely been
forgotten, but names associated with the place still appear frequently
in the world of mathematics. Its legacy survives today in other
mathematical research powerhouses around the world...Great mathematicians By the late 18th century, the university in Göttingen was a
well-known center of scientific learning in Germany. Its enduring
mathematical prowess, however, originated in Carl Friedrich Gauss.
Often referred to as the prince of mathematics, his research at
Göttingen between 1795 and 1855 spanned from algebra to magnetism to
astronomy.Gauss’s discoveries were groundbreaking, but the reputation that he started in Göttingen only grew as mathematicians from across Europe
flocked to the town. Bernhard Riemann, the head of mathematics at
Göttingen from 1859 to 1866, invented Riemannian geometry, which paved
the way for Einstein’s future work on relativity. Felix Klein, the chair
of mathematics from 1886 to 1913, was the first to describe the Klein bottle, a 3-dimensional object with just one side, similar to the Mobius strip...

The exodus Emmy Noether, who had been the first female professor of mathematics at Göttingen and was described by Einstein as the most important woman in the history of mathematics, left in 1933 to teach at Bryn Mawr College. Richard Courant left in 1933 to help found the top US applied mathematics institute at New York University. Hermann Wey,
who had been appointed Hilbert’s successor as chair of mathematics in
Göttingen,l moved to Princeton, where he helped to transform the
Institute for Advanced Studies into a research powerhouse. Read more...

Competitors
solve Rubik's cubes as they prepare for the world's largest Rubik's
Cube championship in Aubervilliers, near Paris, France, July 15, 2017.Photo: REUTERS/Stephane Mahe

The toy consists of a cube made up of 27 smaller cubes arranged in a
3x3x3 grid with colored stickers on the outer faces of the smaller
cubes. A cube starts out in its "solved" configuration with the smaller
faces each of the six sides sharing the same color. Each of the six
faces of the cube can be rotated freely, moving the smaller cubes
around.

The goal of a Rubik's Cube puzzle is to start
with some randomized and shuffled messy configuration of the cube and,
by rotating the faces, get back to the original solved pattern with each
side being a single color.

Actually solving the puzzle
is notoriously tricky. It took Erno Rubik himself about a month after
inventing the cube to be able to solve it.

JBKlutse.com says, There are thousands of e-learning courses to choose from, so it can be
challenging to make the right choice and pick the one that will truly
help you achieve your goals.

Photo: JBKlutse

Having said that, if you’re looking for an
online course designed for female entrepreneurs, you’ll find that it’s
much easier to choose, as there aren’t so many such courses. Of course,
there’s no reason not to enrol in any other course that’s not
specifically aimed at women, because you can certainly learn a lot of
useful stuff that can help you build a successful career. Nevertheless,
we’ve created a short list of e-learning courses that are aimed at
female entrepreneurs. Read on to check them out.Read more...

Ludhiana: Khalsa College for Women, Civil Lines,
has been selected by SWAYAM-NPTEL to host a local chapter in the
institution. The National Programme on Technology Enhancement Learning
(NPTEL), a project funded by the Ministry of Human Resource Development
(MHRD), provides e-learning through online web and video courses in
engineering, Sciences, technology, management and humanities.

Photo: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

This is a
joint initiative by a number of IITs and IISc Bangalore and other
selected premier institutions, which act as associated partner
institutions. Dr Monita Dhiman, Assistant Professor Zoology, has been
nominated as the Single Point of Contact (SPOC) from the college. The
main objective of the NPTEL is to facilitate students of various
institutions through easier competitive means, which will aid in
improving the Indian industry in the global market. SWAYAM-NPTEL is
playing a vital role for enhancement of knowledge of both teachers and
students. Placement drive
The training and placement cell of Guru Nanak Khalsa College for Women,
Gujarkhan Campus, Model Town, organised a placement drive in
collaboration with CONCENTRIX...Career counselling for studentsThe career coaching cell of Khalsa College for Women, Civil Lines,
organised a seminar on ‘Career Guidance And Enhancement Of Employability
Skills’. The seminar provided the opportunity to the students to learn
and pursue various careers after graduation. Read more... Source:The Tribune

Students
at Pownal Elementary School learned that lesson from Williams College
students in a workshop Tuesday, part of a brand-new effort from the
college to teach fifth-graders about coding."Have you guys ever
baked cookies with your parents, or followed a recipe?" asked Francesca
Hellerman, a Williams College student, of the students in Taylor
Robertson's fifth-grade glass. Many hands went up."That's a lot like coding," she said. Hellerman,
along with another Williams student, Suzanna Penikis, conducted the
workshops as part of a winter session course at the college, Hour of
Code. The workshops run Tuesday and Thursday for an hour each at Pownal
Elementary in Robertson and Traci Cristofolini's fifth-grade classrooms;
they're also bringing the workshop to students in North Adams and
Williamstown this month.Students went through the coding
exercises at their own pace, telling the program to do things like print
words and make emojis — happy and otherwise...Recipes for computers An hour isn't a lot of time to
actually teach computer science, he said. The workshops are intended to
expose kids to the idea of coding, he said.Students are given "a bunch of little recipes" to follow — basic coding."They're sort of drawing things on the screen," Barowy said. "We also have an extensive set of emojis."Coding itself can be thought of like writing down a recipe for a computer to follow, he said.And that's the challenge. Read more... Source: Berkshire Eagle

And in Cleveland, there's a new way to donate your
dust-collecting musical instruments (think: that trumpet or violin you
haven't touched since high school).

Starting Monday, five non-profit/public groups, including Arts
Cleveland, the Center for Arts-Inspired Learning, Cleveland City
Council, Cleveland Metropolitan School District and the Cleveland
Orchestra, have come together for a city-wide instrument drive for kids
called Play It Forward. This year, all gently used instruments will go
to children involved with rec center music programs in the Glenville
neighborhood, but expansions are planned for the future.Read more...

After surviving for five months in space, astronaut Chris
Hadfield has a new, tougher challenge: teaching me, a grown man whose
only qualifications are narrowly passing 10th-grade science and usually
keeping motion sickness at bay when commuting, to be a space explorer.

“It will be a great moment of introspection for humanity
if you’re the person who finds that one little fossilized flower on
Mars,” he says over rousing music. He points at the viewer when he says
“you.” That viewer, not the first or even the millionth, is me as I
watchthe trailer for his MasterClass.

MasterClass burst onto the scene in 2015 with more star power than Love, Actually.
Its pitch was simple: Famous people teach you about the thing that made
them famous. For $90, you’d get access to the instructional videos and
workbooks that made up each course. Students could also interact with
one another and maybe their star instructor. Serena Williams reportedly invited one of her students to play tennis. James Patterson published a novel with one of his pupils.

2015 was a heady time for online learning. It was only a few years after the New York Times announced the
“Year of the MOOC (massive open online course).” Universities had
started putting lectures by their star instructors online. In 2013, the
video e-learning platforms CreativeLive and Coursera completed Series B
rounds of $21.5 million and $63 million, respectively. MasterClass
appeared to synthesize all these developments, with the addition of
copious stardust.

While much of e-learning matured into mundanity,
MasterClass has doubled down on celebrity glitz. It now focuses on
selling annual, all-access subscriptions...

Every MasterClass follows the same formula. Bathed in soft light, the
instructor delivers 15 to 30 brief lectures. If the instructor does
something inherently visual for a living, like cooking or sports, those
lessons include demonstrations. The writers just talk. Each lesson comes
with a PDF workbook containing a summary and links to further reading.
Students can record questions for instructors, who periodically post
video replies during “office hours.” The formula extends all the way to
course titles: Person Teaches Skill. Deadmau5 Teaches Electronic Music
Production. Frank Gehry Teaches Design and Architecture. James Suckling
Teaches Wine Appreciation. Teaches.Read more...

Many people find math frustrating. But for some, it can turn into
'statistics anxiety,' a fear of doing math problems that can be
debilitating or even stand in the way of graduationPhoto: Ollyy - Shutterstock

But
for some, it can actually turn into 'statistics anxiety,' a fear of
doing math or statistics problems that can be debilitating or even stand
in the way of graduation.

A new study
from the University of Kansas discovered which factors can contribute
to statistics anxiety and how it can be dealt with.

Previous studies have shown that some 80
percent of college students suffer from statistics anxiety, the
University of Kansas explained.

'We
teach a statistics class in the psychology department and see many
students put it off until senior year because they're scared of this
class,' Michael Vitevitch, professor and chair of psychology at the
University of Kansas, said in a statement...

They used a technique called network
science, which 'puts the most important contributors or symptoms of
statistical anxiety at the center of a visual diagram of connecting
nodes.'

'With statistics anxiety, it's
not just that you have symptoms, it's how long you have them and which
ones are more important?,' Vitevitch explained. Read more... Source: Daily Mail

Marion Boulicault hates making decisions. “I want to do everything,”
she says, “and one of the effects of making a choice is that other
choices are closed off.” Alternately drawn to work in environmental
science, public policy, and philosophy, she has always felt compelled to
bring her interests together.So when she first began her doctorate in philosophy at MIT,
Boulicault assumed that choosing such an abstract field meant letting go
of the pragmatic, on-the-ground impact of a career in public service...

Working at the interface of philosophy and science Through her HASTS interdisciplinary coursework, Boulicault first
encountered a field that intrigued her: the feminist philosophy of
science. She was struck that problems of gender in science go far beyond
equal representation. “The notion of ‘bias’ can’t be understood only at
an individual level — it’s also social, cultural, and structural.
Although science is often idealized as value-free and purely
‘objective,’ it’s a practice done by people and institutions,” she says.
“Science is inherently social.”...

Bringing a humanities perspective to scienceBoulicault has managed to merge her dual passions for conceptual
thinking and public service as a founding member of the Harvard GenderSci Lab, which generates feminist critiques, methods, and concepts for scientific research on sex and gender. At times, operating within a truly interdisciplinary framework is
difficult — the GenderSci Lab consists of biologists, psychologists,
philosophers, and historians — but she has found others with similar
interests and has created her own interdisciplinary space.Read more...Source: MIT News

The fact that certain problems are impossible to solve does not deter enthusiasts, writes Peter Lynch, emeritus professor at UCD school of mathematics and statistics, blogs at thatsmaths.com

Srinivasa Ramanujan, one of the most brilliant mathematicians of the
last century, wrote unsolicited letters to three leading mathematicians
at CambridgePhoto: The Irish Times

Do amateurs ever solve outstanding
mathematical problems? Professional mathematicians are aware that
almost every new idea they have about a mathematical problem has already
occurred to others. Any really new idea must have some feature that
explains why no one has thought of it before.

It is both difficult and rare to
come up with a truly original idea. Such insights almost invariably
result from an extended period of intensive work. If one mathematician
thinks of something original, why would others not have done the same?
Yet, there are those who convince themselves, without justification,
that they have done what no one else could do.

Pseudomaths

Pseudomathematics is an activity
that fails to observe the rigorous standards of formal mathematical
practice and proof. Pseudomathematicians who persist in this activity
become cranks. Most professional mathematicians have received
communications that contain “proofs” of long-open problems. Often, these
claim solutions of problems that have been proven mathematically to be
impossible to solve...

The British mathematician and logician Augustus De Morgan wrote a book, A Budget of Paradoxes, in which he introduced the term pseudomath. As an example of a pseudomath, De Morgan mentioned one James Smith who claimed persistently to have proved that pi is equal to three and
one eighth. De Morgan wrote that Smith “is beyond doubt the ablest head
at unreasoning, and the greatest hand at writing it.”

In the past, many European
scientific academies were bombarded by circle-squarers, angle-trisectors
and cube-duplicators demanding immediate recognition of their
mathematical achievements.

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About Me

Hello, my name is Helge Scherlund and I am the Education Editor and Online Educator of this personal weblog and the founder of eLearning • Computer-Mediated Communication Center.
I have an education in the teaching adults and adult learning from Roskilde University, with Computer-Mediated Communication (CMC) and Human Resource Development (HRD) as specially studied subjects. I am the author of several articles and publications about the use of decision support tools, e-learning and computer-mediated communication. I am a member of The Danish Mathematical Society (DMF), The Danish Society for Theoretical Statistics (DSTS) and an individual member of the European Mathematical Society (EMS). Note: Comments published here are purely my own and do not reflect those of my current or future employers or other organizations.